Wild Tangents
Marc talks about life in Nashville, life as a Catholic and life as a geek.

UPDATE: As Jeff of The Curt Jester pointed out, the latest Google toolbar for Firefox has a great spell checking functionality. I’ve been playing with it and will probably be uninstalling Spelbound in favor of it soon. Unlike Spellbound, you just install it and it works.

UPDATE AGAIN: Well, as you can see the Google bar spell check functionality doesn’t play nice with the Wordpress WYSIWYG editor.  Oh well……  I’ll leave this post the way it is to serve as a warning to you all.  Well, at least anyone who uses Wordpress.

I had to search far and wide to find this, so I thought I would post it here in the hopes of making it easier for others to find it. Firefox is of course the browser that’s taking the web by storm. As often as I comment on websites as well as post here (well, maybe not so often) and as dyslexic as I am, I have to have a spell checker in my browser. I had found the solution with spellbound. The problem is this, when I updated to Firefox version 1.5.0.1, spellbound broke. I mean broke in a big way. I tried installing the latest from their website, but it refused to install saying that it was incompatible with the Firefox version. I know how to fix that, by downloading and modifying the config file that comes with the Firefox extension. But I wasn’t sure if there might not be a reason this extension doesn’t work with the new version of Firefox, so I decided to research it a little. What I found it totally awesome. The latest development version (meaning “beta”) of spellbound would not only work fine with Firefox 1.5.0.1, but it also adds a lot of neat new features including “as you type” checking. COOL!

Here’s what you need to do to get it installed. This of course assumes you already know how to install and uninstall Firefox extensions. If you don’t you need to learn how to do that first by reading this. First uninstall the old version of spellbound. I didn’t have to restart Firefox at this point, but I would suggest you go ahead and do that just to be on the safe side. Then go here to find the latest dev version of the extension and install it. You’ll find the link in a forum post at the top. Just click on the words “Install SpellBound Dev” here or on that website. That will start the install of the extension. You’ll need to allow the site in your preferences. To this, you should see a bar at the top of the browser window that says “To protect you computer, Firefox prevented this site”..etc…. Just click on “Edit Options”. A new box will appear that will ask you to edit your security preferences. Click on “allow site”, then “OK”. All this does it allow you to install extensions from the server they are located on. It does not give anything access to you computer. If you’ve had to go though all this to allow the site, you will need to click on the download link again.

At this point, you’ll need to follow the instructions int he pop-up box to install the extension. Think you’re finished? Think again. Now you need to install a dictionary. Go to the website here to see and install the available be dictionaries. You might have to go through the above procedure to allow the site and install these too, as they are also simply extensions for Firefox.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone out there so they don’t have to go through the Googling and guesswork I did. Have fun and happy spell checking.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2006 at 1:10 pm and is filed under computers, geek, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.